FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT PICNIC - PAGE 3

The picnic season is getting under way, and it's never been easier.The new wave in picnicking includes purchased meals to go, do-ahead menus and lightweight gear that renders ice obsolete. Picnics aren't merely for lazy days in the park, either. They often ride tandem with outdoor cultural events as well as hiking, biking and sailing adventures.Getting it to go: Impromptu picnic fare used to mean fast-food fried chicken. But deli foods are more likely to start today's movable feasts.Chances are your nearest deli is in the supermarket, where you can find salads ranging from the classic coleslaw and potato salad to gourmet salads of seafood with pasta or chicken with grapes.

When you look at the options, it almost scares you. There are so many choices. But the fact is, Maryland, the nation's eighth smallest state, has thousands of settings for that late-summer picnic. And most of them are nearby or within an hour or two's drive.It takes, in fact, 104 pages of the state's latest recreational guide ("Maryland Travel & Outdoor Guide") to list all the top tour possibilities and the wide open spaces.But you better hurry. Summer is waning, even if the thermometer doesn't show signs of it yet. Only 24 days and three weekends remain before the traditional shutdown of the great American outdoor season after Labor Day. And there's no guarantee the weather will play fair.

It's been more than a century since a few west county farmer and their families first hauled water and their best produce to the old St. Louis Church on Ten Oaks Road in Clarksville.On June 26, that unbroken tradition will continue with the 115th Annual Clarksville Picnic, but this time the farmers will be joined by doctors, lawyers and corporate executives and their families.There won't be any barnstormers giving rides, as there were in 1929, or dancers doing the jitterbug on an outdoor dance floor, as there were during the 1940s.

Renee Tanner arrived at dawn, found the largest shade tree in Druid Hill Park, pitched a tent, tossed blankets across the grassy lawn and set up her tables. "This is our spread," said Tanner, who had come from St. Mary's County for the 10th annual Stone Soul Picnic in the city park yesterday. She also brought six children - and two bushels of steamed crabs for some 50 relatives who joined her party. By noon she was ensconced in a comfortable chair, ready for seven hours of free concert music.

Starting at 11 a.m. Saturday you can spend the whole day enjoying the Clarksville Picnic. This year's event at St. Louis Church features hits from the past and new events.Always of note is the $10,000 drawing, which takes place about 9 p.m. Ticket sellers have sold almost all of the $10 tickets. None will be left picnic day. Call the church office at 531-6040 to find out how to purchase your ticket.Volunteer workers will serve dinner from noon until 6 p.m. and the picnic goes on until dark.

Friday is field trip day for the life skills class at Owings Mills High School. Last week, students were supposed to go bowling. Instead, the weather was so nice that at the last minute the teacher decided to take the class on a picnic - at her house. "That's not what a mother wants to hear," said Kemi Olunloyo, whose autistic son, Enitan, is a member of the class. "The children should not have spent the day at her house. They should have told me where my kid was. "Let's face it, they did something wrong here.

In 1877, George Bitzel, a member of Trinity Lutheran Church in Smallwood, cleared an area of trees in preparation for the church's first community picnic. More than 125 years later, the annual event is still being held on the same grounds. The 128th annual Dutch Picnic Festival is expected to draw more than 500 people, said Beth Werrell, chairwoman of the evangelism committee chairwoman at Trinity Lutheran. The event will be from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday at the church, at 833 Deer Park Road.

By Mary Johnson and Mary Johnson,Special to The Sun | February 9, 2007

Bay Theatre Company co-founders Lucinda Merry-Browne and Janet Luby are enthusiastic, but humble about their latest production: William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic. "We've never done Inge, and his plays capture place and time of innocence in a kind of '50s snapshot of everyday life in Kansas," said Merry-Browne, the troupe's managing and artistic director. "Humor springs from the sweetness of the people - wonderful women characters like Flo, a woman raising two daughters by herself, which wasn't easy in this period when having a man was considered essential to a woman's status and happiness, also seen in the spinster character Rosemary."

Georgia Wilson got up early yesterday morning, slipped on her pale lavender skirt suit and pinned a shiny gold cross to her lapel. Since the 1930s, the 92-year-old Westminster resident has attended an annual fund-raising picnic at Zion United Methodist Church in the tiny town of Shipley in Carroll County. The drill for almost 70 years has been the same - a home-cooked lunch, an ice-cream cone and then an afternoon of watching the children play games as a gospel or country music group performs in the background.